Hokkien


Hokkien or Minnan language, known as Quanzhang/Tsuan-Tsiang in linguistics, is a Southern Min language originating from the Minnan region in the south-eastern part of Fujian Province in Southeastern China, and spoken widely there. It is also spoken widely in Taiwan, where it is sometimes called Holo, and by the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia, and by other overseas Chinese all over the world.
Hokkien historically served as the lingua franca amongst overseas Chinese communities of all dialects and subgroups in Southeast Asia, and remains today as the most spoken variety of Chinese in the region, including in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and some parts of Indochina.
The Betawi Malay language, spoken by some five million people in and around the Indonesian capital Jakarta, includes numerous Hokkien loanwords due to the significant influence of the Chinese Indonesian diaspora, most of whom are of Hokkien ancestry and origin.

Names

Chinese speakers of the Quanzhang variety of Southern Min refer to the mainstream Southern Min language as
In parts of Southeast Asia and in the English-speaking communities, the term Hokkien is etymologically derived from the Southern Min pronunciation for Fujian, the province from which the language hails. In Southeast Asia and the English press, Hokkien is used in common parlance to refer to the Southern Min dialects of southern Fujian, and does not include reference to dialects of other Sinitic branches also present in Fujian such as the Fuzhou dialect, Putian dialect, Northern Min, Gan Chinese or Hakka. In Chinese linguistics, these dialects are known by their classification under the Quanzhang division of Min Nan, which comes from the first characters of the two main Hokkien urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.
The word Hokkien first originated from Walter Henry Medhurst when he published the Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832. This is considered to be the earliest English-based Hokkien Dictionary and the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system. In this dictionary, the word "Hok-këèn" was used. In 1869, POJ was further revised by John Macgowan in his published book A Manual Of The Amoy Colloquial. In this book, "këèn" was changed to "kien" and from then on, the word "Hokkien" began to be used more often.

Geographic distribution

Hokkien originated in the southern area of Fujian province, an important center for trade and migration, and has since become one of the most common Chinese varieties overseas. The major pole of Hokkien varieties outside of Fujian is nearby Taiwan, where immigrants from Fujian arrived as workers during the 40 years of Dutch rule, fleeing the Qing Dynasty during the 20 years years of Ming loyalist rule, as immigrants during the 200 years of Qing dynasty rule, especially in the last 120 years after immigration restrictions were relaxed, and even as immigrants during the period of Japanese rule. The Taiwanese dialect mostly has origins with the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou variants, but since then, the Amoy dialect, also known as the Xiamen dialect, is becoming the modern prestige standard for the language in Mainland China. Both Amoy and Xiamen come from the Chinese name of the city ; the former is from Zhangzhou Hokkien, whereas the later comes from Mandarin.
There are many Minnan speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia as well as in the United States. Many ethnic Han Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia and present day Malaysia and Singapore. Many of the Minnan dialects of this region are highly similar to Xiamen dialect and Taiwan Hokkien with the exception of foreign loanwords. Hokkien is reportedly the native language of up to 80% of the Chinese people in the Philippines, among which is known locally as Lan-nang or Lán-lâng-oē. Hokkien speakers form the largest group of overseas Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines.

Classification

Southern Fujian is home to three principal Minnan Proper dialects: Chinchew, Amoy, Chiangchew, originating from the cities of Quanzhou, Xiamen and Zhangzhou.
Traditionally speaking, Quanzhou dialect spoken in Quanzhou is the Traditional Standard Minnan, it is the dialect that is used in and and . Being the Traditional Standard Minnan, Quanzhou dialect is considered to have the purest accent and the most conservative Minnan dialect.
In the late 18th to the early 19th century, Xiamen became the principal city of southern Fujian. Xiamen dialect is adopted as the Modern Standard Minnan. It is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. It has played an influential role in history, especially in the relations of Western nations with China, and was one of the most frequently learnt dialect of Quanzhang variety by Westerners during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
The Modern Standard form of Quanzhang accent spoken around the city of Tainan in Taiwan is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, in the same way as the Amoy dialect. All Quanzhang dialects spoken throughout the whole of Taiwan are collectively known as Taiwanese Hokkien, or Holo locally, although there is a tendency to call these Taiwanese language for political reasons. It is spoken by more Taiwanese than any Sinitic language except Mandarin, and it is known by a majority of the population; thus, from a socio-political perspective, it forms a significant pole of language usage due to the popularity of Holo-language media.

Southeast Asia

The varieties of Hokkien in Southeast Asia originate from these dialects.
The Singaporeans, Southern Malaysians and people in Indonesia's Riau and surrounding islands variant is from the Quanzhou area. They speak a distinct form of Quanzhou Hokkien called Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien.
Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, and other states in Northern Malaysia and Medan, with other areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia, a distinct form of Zhangzhou Hokkien has developed. In Penang, it is called Penang Hokkien while across the Malacca Strait in Medan, an almost identical variant is known as Medan Hokkien.
The Philippines variant is mostly from Quanzhou or Amoy, as most of their ancestors are from the aforementioned area.

History

Variants of Hokkien dialects can be traced to two sources of origin: Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Both Amoy and most Taiwanese are based on a mixture of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, while the rest of the Hokkien dialects spoken in South East Asia are either derived from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, or based on a mixture of both dialects.

Quanzhou

During the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China, there was constant warfare occurring in the Central Plain of China. Northerners began to enter into Fujian region, causing the region to incorporate parts of northern Chinese dialects. However, the massive migration of northern Han Chinese into Fujian region mainly occurred after the Disaster of Yongjia. The Jìn court fled from the north to the south, causing large numbers of northern Han Chinese to move into Fujian region. They brought the Old Chinese spoken in the Central Plain of China from the prehistoric era to the 3rd century into Fujian. This then gradually evolved into the Quanzhou dialect.

Zhangzhou

In 677, Chen Zheng, together with his son Chen Yuanguang, led a military expedition to suppress a rebellion of the She people. In 885,, the two brothers Wang Chao and Wang Shenzhi, led a military expedition force to suppress the Huang Chao rebellion. These two waves of migration from the north brought the language of northern Middle Chinese into the Fujian region. This then gradually evolved into the Zhangzhou dialect.

Xiamen (Amoy)

The Amoy dialect is the main dialect spoken in the Chinese city of Xiamen and its surrounding regions of Tong'an and Xiang'an, both of which are now included in the greater Xiamen area. This dialect developed in the late Ming dynasty when Xiamen was increasingly taking over Quanzhou's position as the main port of trade in southeastern China. Quanzhou traders began traveling southwards to Xiamen to carry on their businesses while Zhangzhou peasants began traveling northwards to Xiamen in search of job opportunities. A need for a common language arose. The Quanzhou and Zhangzhou varieties are similar in many ways, but due to differences in accents, communication can be a problem. Quanzhou businessmen considered their speech to be the prestige accent and considered Zhangzhou's to be a village dialect. Over the centuries, dialect leveling occurred and the two speeches mixed to produce the Amoy dialect.

Early sources

Several playscripts survive from the late 16th century, written in a mixture of Quanzhou and Chaozhou dialects. The most important is the Romance of the Litchi Mirror, with extant manuscripts dating from 1566 and 1581.
In the early 17th century, Spanish missionaries in the Philippines produced materials documenting the Hokkien varieties spoken by the Chinese trading community who had settled there in the late 16th century:
These texts appear to record a Zhangzhou dialect, from the area of Haicheng.
Chinese scholars produced rhyme dictionaries describing Hokkien varieties at the beginning of the 19th century:
Walter Henry Medhurst based his 1832 dictionary on the latter work.

Phonology

Hokkien has one of the most diverse phoneme inventories among Chinese varieties, with more consonants than Standard Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese. Vowels are more-or-less similar to that of Standard Mandarin. Hokkien varieties retain many pronunciations that are no longer found in other Chinese varieties. These include the retention of the initial, which is now in Mandarin, having disappeared before the 6th century in other Chinese varieties.

Finals

Unlike Mandarin, Hokkien retains all the final consonants corresponding to those of Middle Chinese. While Mandarin only preserves the n and ŋ finals, Southern Min also preserves the m, p, t and k finals and developed the ʔ.
The vowels of Hokkien are listed below:
Only certain dialects
The following table illustrates some of the more commonly seen vowel shifts. Characters with the same vowel are shown in parentheses.
EnglishChinese characterAccentPe̍h-ōe-jīIPATeochew Peng'Im
twoQuanzhou, Taipeilījĭ
twoXiamen, Zhangzhou, Tainanjījĭ
sick Quanzhou, Xiamen, Taipeipīⁿpēⁿ
sick Zhangzhou, Tainanpēⁿpēⁿ
egg Quanzhou, Xiamen, Taiwannn̄gnn̆g
egg Zhangzhounūinn̆g
chopsticks Quanzhoutīrtēu
chopsticks Xiamen, Taipeitūtēu
chopsticks Zhangzhou, Tainantītēu
shoes ----
shoes Quanzhou, Xiamen, Taipeioêôi
shoes Zhangzhou, Tainanêôi
leather Quanzhouphêrphuê
leather Xiamen, Taipeiphêphuê
leather Zhangzhou, Tainanphôephuê
chicken Quanzhou, Xiamen, Taipeikoekoi
chicken Zhangzhou, Tainankekoi
hair Quanzhou, Taiwan, Xiamenmn̂gmo
hair Zhangzhou, Taiwanmo͘mo
returnQuanzhouhoanhuêng
returnXiamenhâiⁿhuêng
returnZhangzhou, Taiwanhênghuêng
Speech Quanzhou, Taiwanoe
Speech Zhangzhouoa

Initials

Southern Min has aspirated, unaspirated as well as voiced consonant initials. For example, the word khui and kuiⁿ have the same vowel but differ only by aspiration of the initial and nasality of the vowel. In addition, Southern Min has labial initial consonants such as m in m̄-sī.
Another example is da-po͘-kiáⁿ and cha-bó͘-kiáⁿ, which differ in the second syllable in consonant voicing and in tone.
In general, Hokkien dialects have 5 to 8 phonemic tones. Four tones can be noted as. According to the traditional Chinese system, however, there are 7 to 9 tones if the two additional entering tones are counted. Tone sandhi is extensive. There are minor variations between the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou tone systems. Taiwanese tones follow the patterns of Amoy or Quanzhou, depending on the area of Taiwan. Many dialects have an additional phonemic tone, used only in special or foreign loan words.

Dialects

Similar to England, the Hokkien language is spoken in a variatiety of accents and dialects across the Minnan region. The Hokkien spoken in most areas of the three counties of southern Zhangzhou have merged the coda finals -n and -ng into -ng. The initial consonant j is not present in most dialects of Hokkien spoken in Quanzhou, having been merged into the d or l initials.
The -ik or -ɪk final consonant that is preserved in the native Hokkien dialects of Zhangzhou and Xiamen is also preserved in the Nan'an dialect but lost in most dialects of Quanzhou Hokkien.
The Amoy dialect is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. Taiwanese is also a hybrid of these two dialects. Taiwanese in northern and coastal Taiwan tends to be based on the Quanzhou variety, whereas the Taiwanese spoken in central, south and inland Taiwan tends to be based on Zhangzhou speech. There are minor variations in pronunciation and vocabulary between Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. The grammar is generally the same. Additionally, extensive contact with the Japanese language has left a legacy of Japanese loanwords in Taiwanese Hokkien. On the other hand, the variants spoken in Singapore and Malaysia have a substantial number of loanwords from Malay and to a lesser extent, from English and other Chinese varieties, such as the closely related Teochew and some Cantonese.
Penang Hokkien and Medan Hokkien are based on Zhangzhou dialect, whereas Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien is based on Quanzhou dialect.

Mutual intelligibility

The Quanzhou dialect, Xiamen dialect, Zhangzhou dialect and Taiwanese are generally mutually intelligible. The overseas varieties such as Penang Hokkien and Singaporean Hokkien are slightly less intelligible to speakers of mainland Min Nan and Taiwanese dialects due to the existence of foreign loanwords.
Although the Min Nan varieties of Teochew and Amoy are 84% phonetically similar including the pronunciations of un-used Chinese characters as well as same characters used for different meanings, and 34% lexically similar,, Teochew has only 51% intelligibility with the Tong'an Xiamen dialect of the Hokkien language whereas Mandarin and Amoy Min Nan are 62% phonetically similar and 15% lexically similar. In comparison, German and English are 60% lexically similar.
Hainanese, which is sometimes considered Southern Min, has almost no mutual intelligibility with any form of Hokkien.

Grammar

Hokkien is an analytic language; in a sentence, the arrangement of words is important to its meaning. A basic sentence follows the subject–verb–object pattern, though this order is often violated because Hokkien dialects are topic-prominent. Unlike synthetic languages, seldom do words indicate time, gender and plural by inflection. Instead, these concepts are expressed through adverbs, aspect markers, and grammatical particles, or are deduced from the context. Different particles are added to a sentence to further specify its status or intonation.
A verb itself indicates no grammatical tense. The time can be explicitly shown with time-indicating adverbs. Certain exceptions exist, however, according to the pragmatic interpretation of a verb's meaning. Additionally, an optional aspect particle can be appended to a verb to indicate the state of an action. Appending interrogative or exclamative particles to a sentence turns a statement into a question or shows the attitudes of the speaker.
Hokkien dialects preserve certain grammatical reflexes and patterns reminiscent of the broad stage of Archaic Chinese. This includes the serialization of verb phrases and the infrequency of nominalization, both similar to Archaic Chinese grammar.
Choice of grammatical function words also varies significantly among the Hokkien dialects. For instance, 乞 khit is retained in Jinjiang and in Jieyang, but not in Longxi and Xiamen, whose dialects use 互 instead.

Pronouns

Hokkien dialects differ in their preferred choice of pronouns. For instance, while the second person pronoun lí is standard in Taiwanese Hokkien, the Teochew loanword lú is more common among Hokkien-speaking communities in Southeast Asia. The plural personal pronouns tend to be nasalized forms of the singular ones. Personal pronouns found in the Hokkien dialects are listed below:
PersonSingularPlural
First person我
góa		阮1, 3gún, góan

咱2, 3 or 俺
lán or án

我儂
góa-lâng
Second person汝
lí

汝
lú		恁
lín

恁儂
lín lâng
Third person伊
i		?
in

伊儂
i lâng

Possessive pronouns are marked by the particle ê, or its literary version chi. Plural pronouns are typically unmarked :
Reflexive pronouns are made by appending the pronouns ka-kī or chū-kí.
Hokkien dialects use a variety of differing demonstrative pronouns, which are as follows:
The interrogative pronouns are:
States and qualities are generally expressed using stative verbs that do not require the verb "to be":
With noun complements, the verb sī serves as the verb "to be".
To indicate location, the words tī tiàm, leh, which are collectively known as the locatives or sometimes coverbs in Chinese linguistics, are used to express " at":

Negation

Hokkien dialects have a variety of negation particles that are prefixed or affixed to the verbs they modify. There are five primary negation particles in Hokkien dialects:
  1. m̄
  2. bē, bōe
  3. mài
  4. bô
  5. put - literary
Other negative particles include:
  1. biàu - a contraction of bô iàu, as in biàu-kín
  2. bàng
  3. bián
  4. thài
The particles m̄ is general and can negate almost any verb:
The particle mài, a concatenation of m-ài is used to negate imperative commands:
The particle bô indicates the past tense:
The verb 'to have', ū is replaced by bô when negated :
The particle put is used infrequently, mostly found in literary compounds and phrases:

Vocabulary

The majority of Hokkien vocabulary is monosyllabic. Many Hokkien words have cognates in other Chinese varieties. That said, there are also many indigenous words that are unique to Hokkien and are potentially not of Sino-Tibetan origin, while others are shared by all the Min dialects.
As compared to Standard Chinese, Hokkien dialects prefer to use the monosyllabic form of words, without suffixes. For instance, the Mandarin noun suffix 子 is not found in Hokkien words, while another noun suffix, 仔 is used in many nouns. Examples are below:
In other bisyllabic morphemes, the syllables are inverted, as compared to Standard Chinese. Examples include the following:
In other cases, the same word can have different meanings in Hokkien and standard written Chinese. Similarly, depending on the region Hokkien is spoken in, loanwords from local languages, as well as other Chinese dialects, are commonly integrated into the vocabulary of Hokkien dialects.

Literary and colloquial readings

The existence of literary and colloquial readings is a prominent feature of some Hokkien dialects and indeed in many Sinitic varieties in the south. The bulk of literary readings, based on pronunciations of the vernacular during the Tang Dynasty, are mainly used in formal phrases and written language, while the colloquial ones are usually used in spoken language, vulgar phrases and surnames. Literary readings are more similar to the pronunciations of the Tang standard of Middle Chinese than their colloquial equivalents.
The pronounced divergence between literary and colloquial pronunciations found in Hokkien dialects is attributed to the presence of several strata in the Min lexicon. The earliest, colloquial stratum is traced to the Han dynasty ; the second colloquial one comes from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties ; the third stratum of pronunciations comes from the Tang Dynasty and is based on the prestige dialect of Chang'an, its capital.
Some commonly seen sound correspondences are as follows:
This table displays some widely used characters in Hokkien that have both literary and colloquial readings:
This feature extends to Chinese numerals, which have both literary and colloquial readings. Literary readings are typically used when the numerals are read out loud, while colloquial readings are used for counting items.

Semantic differences between Hokkien and Mandarin

Quite a few words from the variety of Old Chinese spoken in the state of Wu, where the ancestral language of Min and Wu dialect families originated, and later words from Middle Chinese as well, have retained the original meanings in Hokkien, while many of their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese have either fallen out of daily use, have been substituted with other words, or have developed newer meanings. The same may be said of Hokkien as well, since some lexical meaning evolved in step with Mandarin while others are wholly innovative developments.
This table shows some Hokkien dialect words from Classical Chinese, as contrasted to the written Chinese standard, Mandarin:
For other words, the classical Chinese meanings of certain words, which are retained in Hokkien dialects, have evolved or deviated significantly in other Chinese dialects. The following table shows some words that are both used in both Hokkien dialects and Mandarin Chinese, while the meanings in Mandarin Chinese have been modified:

Words from Minyue

Some commonly used words, shared by all Min Chinese dialects, came from the ancient Minyue languages. Jerry Norman suggested that these languages were Austroasiatic. Some terms are thought be cognates with words in Tai Kadai and Austronesian languages. They include the following examples, compared to the Fuzhou dialect, a Min Dong language:
WordHokkien POJFoochow RomanizedMeaning
骹kha kă foot and leg
囝kiáⁿ giāng son, child, whelp, a small amount
睏khùn káung to sleep
骿phiaⁿ piăng back, dorsum
厝chhù chuó, chió home, house
刣thâi tài to kill, to slaughter
bah, mah—meat
媠suí—beautiful

Loanwords

s are not unusual among Hokkien dialects, as speakers readily adopted indigenous terms of the languages they came in contact with. As a result, there is a plethora of loanwords that are not mutually comprehensible among Hokkien dialects.
Taiwanese Hokkien, as a result of linguistic contact with Japanese and Formosan languages, contains many loanwords from these languages. Many words have also been formed as calques from Mandarin, and speakers will often directly use Mandarin vocabulary through codeswitching. Among these include the following examples:
Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien and other Malaysian Hokkien dialects tend to draw loanwords from Malay, English as well as other Chinese dialects, primarily Teochew. Examples include:
Philippine Hokkien dialects, as a result of centuries-old contact with both Philippine language and Spanish also incorporate words from these languages. Examples include:
Hokkien originated from Quanzhou. After the Opium War in 1842, Xiamen became one of the major treaty ports to be opened for trade with the outside world. From the mid-19th century onwards, Xiamen slowly developed to become the political and economical center of the Hokkien speaking region in China. This caused Amoy dialect to gradually replace the position of dialect variants from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. From the mid-19th century until the end of World War II, western diplomats usually learned Amoy as the preferred dialect if they were to communicate with the Hokkien-speaking populace in China or South-East Asia. In the 1940s and 1950s, Taiwan also held Amoy Minnan as its standard and tended to incline towards Amoy dialect.
However, from the 1980s onwards, the development of Taiwanese Min Nan pop music and media industry in Taiwan caused the Hokkien cultural hub to shift from Xiamen to Taiwan. The flourishing Taiwanese Min Nan entertainment and media industry from Taiwan in the 1990s and early 21st century led Taiwan to emerge as the new significant cultural hub for Hokkien.
In the 1990s, marked by the liberalization of language development and mother tongue movement in Taiwan, Taiwanese Hokkien had undergone a fast pace in its development. In 1993, Taiwan became the first region in the world to implement the teaching of Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwanese schools. In 2001, the local Taiwanese language program was further extended to all schools in Taiwan, and Taiwanese Hokkien became one of the compulsory local Taiwanese languages to be learned in schools. The mother tongue movement in Taiwan even influenced Xiamen to the point that in 2010, Xiamen also began to implement the teaching of Hokkien dialect in its schools. In 2007, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan also completed the standardization of Chinese characters used for writing Hokkien and developed Tai-lo as the standard Hokkien pronunciation and romanization guide. A number of universities in Taiwan also offer Taiwanese degree courses for training Hokkien-fluent talents to work for the Hokkien media industry and education. Taiwan also has its own Hokkien literary and cultural circles whereby Hokkien poets and writers compose poetry or literature in Hokkien.
Thus by the 21st century, Taiwan has become one of the most significant Hokkien cultural hubs of the world. The historical changes and development in Taiwan had led Taiwanese Hokkien to become the more influential pole of the Hokkien dialect after the mid-20th century. Today, Taiwanese prestige dialect, which is based on Tainan variant and heard on Taiwanese Hokkien media.

Writing systems

Chinese script

Hokkien dialects are typically written using Chinese characters. However, the written script was and remains adapted to the literary form, which is based on classical Chinese, not the vernacular and spoken form. Furthermore, the character inventory used for Mandarin does not correspond to Hokkien words, and there are a large number of informal characters which are unique to Hokkien. For instance, about 20 to 25% of Taiwanese morphemes lack an appropriate or standard Chinese character.
While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated characters, they are not always etymological or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. Examples include "beautiful", whose vernacular morpheme suí is represented by characters like 媠, 婎 and even 水, or "tall" , whose morpheme kôan is 懸. Common grammatical particles are not exempt; the negation particle m̄ is variously represented by 毋, 呣 or 唔, among others. In other cases, characters are invented to represent a particular morpheme. In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words. For example, the Hokkien word bah has been reduced to the character 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings. Another case is the word 'to eat,' chia̍h, which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as 呷, even though its recommended character in dictionaries is 食.
Moreover, unlike Cantonese, Hokkien does not have a universally accepted standardized character set. Thus, there is some variation in the characters used to express certain words and characters can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China formulated and released a standard character set to overcome these difficulties. These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan.

Latin script

Hokkien, especially Taiwanese Hokkien, is sometimes written in the Latin script using one of several alphabets. Of these the most popular is POJ, developed first by Presbyterian missionaries in China and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. Use of this script and orthography has been actively promoted since the late 19th century. The use of a mixed script of Han characters and Latin letters is also seen, though remains uncommon. Other Latin-based alphabets also exist.
Min Nan texts, all Hokkien, can be dated back to the 16th century. One example is the Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china, presumably written after 1587 by the Spanish Dominicans in the Philippines. Another is a Ming Dynasty script of a play called Tale of the Lychee Mirror, supposedly the earliest Southern Min colloquial text, although it is written in Teochew dialect.
Taiwan has developed a Latin alphabet for Taiwanese Hokkien, derived from POJ, known as Tai-lo. Since 2006, it has been officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and taught in Taiwanese schools. Xiamen University has also developed an alphabet based on Pinyin called Bbánlám pìngyīm.

Computing

Hokkien is registered as "Southern Min" per RFC 3066 as .
When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use directly or borrow existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja and Japanese kanji. Some of these are not encoded in Unicode, thus creating problems in computer processing.
All Latin characters required by Pe̍h-ōe-jī can be represented using Unicode, using precomposed or combining characters. Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than o, written with a dot above right, was not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the character Interpunct or less commonly the combining character dot above. As these are far from ideal, since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC working group in charge of ISO/IEC 10646—namely, —to encode a new combining character dot above right. This is now officially assigned to U+0358.

Cultural and political role

Hokkien can trace its roots through the Tang Dynasty and also even further to the people of the Minyue, the indigenous non-Han people of modern-day Fujian. Min Nan people call themselves "Tang people," which is synonymous to "Chinese people". Because of the widespread influence of the Tang culture during the great Tang dynasty, there are today still many Min Nan pronunciations of words shared by the Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese languages.
In 2002, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a party with about 10% of the Legislative Yuan seats at the time, suggested making Taiwanese a second official language. This proposal encountered strong opposition not only from Mainlander groups but also from Hakka and Taiwanese aboriginal groups who felt that it would slight their home languages. Because of these objections, support for this measure was lukewarm among moderate Taiwan independence supporters, and the proposal did not pass.
Hokkien was finally made an official language of Taiwan in 2018 by the ruling DPP government.
EnglishChinese charactersMandarin ChineseTaiwanese HokkienKoreanVietnameseJapanese
Book冊CèChhehChaekTập/SáchSaku/Satsu/Shaku
Bridge橋QiáoKiôKyoCầu/KiềuKyō
Dangerous危險WēixiǎnGuî-hiámWiheomNguy hiểmKiken
Flag旗QíKîKiCờ/KỳKi
Insurance保險BǎoxiǎnPó-hiámBoheomBảo hiểmHoken
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